I would read a lot into the last few days. The company has alienated a vast majority of their customer base, and the stock has dropped 7% in just a few days time when the rest of the market has been in a rally. Before this announcement, the stock was doing well because the CC + normal licensing was working fine for Adobe. After this announcement, they will literally lose the vast majority of their customers. As investors realize that this scheme to generate new quarterly profits won't succeed, they will abandon this sinking ship and Adobe's stock going to drop like a rock --- unless of course Adobe backs off on their plan for a cloud only solution.
Ho1972 wrote:
And then there's tech support...
"Hallo? How I am halping you today?"
Usually after 30 min. of senseless blabber I heard:
"We haven't been trained. I'll transfer you…"
BTW, Adobe revenue wasn't looking good and the ideas for PS "improvements" dried out.
They had to do something, but it looks like an act of desperation.
The really sad part of all this is the death of a great app.
Same with Kodak, and everyone else, mis-management at it's greatest.
I can only imagine what the people that work at Adobe are thinking...
Yeah...I feel the same way. I'm mad at Adobe for this move, and I will not subscribe to CC as the terms currently stand (if they made it more affordable and put in perpetual licenses after a time, I'd probably buy in). That said, I absolutely love Photoshop and Lightroom. It's the reason I've plopped down well over $1K on Photoshop over the years, including upgrades to 7, CS2, CS5 and CS6, and why I bought LR3 (When it was $299) and the LR 4 upgrade. I'll probably buy the LR 5 upgrade. (I want to reward their standalone products while ignoring the forced cloud).
I'll probably use CS6 for years before I start looking for alternatives because CS6 is far better than any of the other options right now, and the presence of Photoshop CC doesn't change that. It would be hard to live without content-aware fill, the great handling of layers, the integration with the Nik plugins (of which I have them all now due to Google's gifting of them to me after purchasing SFX2 and HDREfex), the adaptive wide-angle filter (which has been worth the entire cost of the CS6 upgrade in my mind)....
It's going to take a while for people to catch up. Which is partly why I've been so vocal against Adobe's move here. My best case scenario is they backtrack and realize they've alienated a huge portion of their user base, and end up releasing certain frozen portions of Photoshop CC as standalone upgrades with a perpetual license.
Jman13 wrote:
Yeah...I feel the same way. I'm mad at Adobe for this move, and I will not subscribe to CC as the terms currently stand (if they made it more affordable and put in perpetual licenses after a time, I'd probably buy in). That said, I absolutely love Photoshop and Lightroom. It's the reason I've plopped down well over $1K on Photoshop over the years, including upgrades to 7, CS2, CS5 and CS6, and why I bought LR3 (When it was $299) and the LR 4 upgrade. I'll probably buy the LR 5 upgrade. (I want to reward their standalone products while ignoring the forced cloud).
I'll probably use CS6 for years before I start looking for alternatives because CS6 is far better than any of the other options right now, and the presence of Photoshop CC doesn't change that. It would be hard to live without content-aware fill, the great handling of layers, the integration with the Nik plugins (of which I have them all now due to Google's gifting of them to me after purchasing SFX2 and HDREfex), the adaptive wide-angle filter (which has been worth the entire cost of the CS6 upgrade in my mind)....
It's going to take a while for people to catch up. Which is partly why I've been so vocal against Adobe's move here. My best case scenario is they backtrack and realize they've alienated a huge portion of their user base, and end up releasing certain frozen portions of Photoshop CC as standalone upgrades with a perpetual license....Show more →
Since those of us that have our licensed copies of the PS CS6 are on file for Adobe, I suspect that they will start to notice our absence for signing up for the CC version of PS. They will probably be sending us e-mail reminders. And if we still do not subscribe, Adobe may start getting the hint that maybe they should reconsider their decision.
The biggest problem is that many people here think that we photographers are a large part of the share of users, we are not, probably less than 10% as mentioned by Adobe. They specialize in document handling and they have said that Lightroom is for Photographers and PS is for pro graphics designers. I hate what they are doing but they are hardly going to notice, they already had 500,000 cloud subscribers so 20K irate photographers is not going to impact them greatly, people will still sign up unfortunately.
apsphoto wrote:
The biggest problem is that many people here think that we photographers are a large part of the share of users, we are not, probably less than 10% as mentioned by Adobe. They specialize in document handling and they have said that Lightroom is for Photographers and PS is for pro graphics designers. I hate what they are doing but they are hardly going to notice, they already had 500,000 cloud subscribers so 20K irate photographers is not going to impact them greatly, people will still sign up unfortunately.
Alan
Alan,
I would suspect that it is many more than 20,000 photographers. I think PPA alone has over 16,000 members and then there is ASMP as well as many other photographic groups. I really do not think it is in Adobe's best interest to piss off organizations like PPA and ASMP. They do carry a fair amount of weight and they have weighed in on issues before with some success.
About the only thing I want to contribute is that Adobe likely had a lot of research that went into their decision and that they're probably going to stay with their announced plan. They no doubt anticipated the reaction they would get. It won't make much difference in the end.
luminosity wrote:
About the only thing I want to contribute is that Adobe likely had a lot of research that went into their decision and that they're probably going to stay with their announced plan. They no doubt anticipated the reaction they would get. It won't make much difference in the end.
I believe they have miscalculated the reaction to this. Scott Kelby looked shell shocked. Had Adobe know that the reaction would be so negative they would have come up with something to mitigate or outright prevent it completely. They don't want bad press or feelings from users going sour on them. Photoshop is a beloved piece of software. Adobe is not exactly beloved right now.
Tom K. wrote:
I believe they have miscalculated the reaction to this. Scott Kelby looked shell shocked. Had Adobe know that the reaction would be so negative they would have come up with something to mitigate or outright prevent it completely. They don't want bad press or feelings from users going sour on them. Photoshop is a beloved piece of software. Adobe is not exactly beloved right now.
Kelby is a salesman, he was not shocked, he knew it was coming and was told a long time ago, they already have their tutorials etc. in the can waiting for the release date. He has had a long term relationship with early warning for years and years. It was no surprise, he is just doing damage control to keep from losing his own subscribers.
luminosity wrote:
About the only thing I want to contribute is that Adobe likely had a lot of research that went into their decision and that they're probably going to stay with their announced plan. They no doubt anticipated the reaction they would get. It won't make much difference in the end.
Sadly, the corporate landscape is littered with failed strategies, especially when research was targeted at maximising profit and failing to establish exactly what their paying customers actual needs were of their products and services. In the current world economic climate, I find it incredulous that any business would implement a strategy that would call into question its integrity and potentially alienate existing and future customers.
A book covering the events of this sorry saga would be compelling reading, a title 'Real World F@*! Up with Adobe' comes to mind …
Tom K. wrote:
I believe they have miscalculated the reaction to this. Scott Kelby looked shell shocked. Had Adobe know that the reaction would be so negative they would have come up with something to mitigate or outright prevent it completely. They don't want bad press or feelings from users going sour on them. Photoshop is a beloved piece of software. Adobe is not exactly beloved right now.
Agree. I think many of these Adobe lackeys knew what was about to happen but were genuinely shocked at the extent of the reaction.
Of course Adobe is going to say they expected the reaction. How incompetent would they look if they said otherwise! I think they have really stepped in it this time.
Tariq Gibran wrote:
Agree. I think many of these Adobe lackeys knew what was about to happen but were genuinely shocked at the extent of the reaction.
Of course Adobe is going to say they expected the reaction. How incompetent would they look if they said otherwise! I think they have really stepped in it this time.
Anyone should have expected the reaction. I certainly did as soon as I heard about it. I'm sure Adobe factored it into their plans.
I suspect they did not expect anywhere near this reaction. Office365 Home Premium has had a pretty good reaction and it's the most comparable move. I think Adobe was expecting something akin to the Office365 reaction, not the massive and building backlash they got.
Of course Microsoft also allow perpetual licenses and made their cloud solution a significant deal rather than a massive price increase (O365 HP nets you up to 5 platform-independent licenses vs 1 platform-dependent license under the perpetual license scheme, breakeven point seems to be at around 2 machines for most users and the typical 2-2.5 year dev cycle for Office. The significantly improved Outlook is a big win as well, it finally plays properly with the Exchange in the Cloud aspects of the Business Office365 packages).
naturephoto1 wrote:
Since those of us that have our licensed copies of the PS CS6 are on file for Adobe, I suspect that they will start to notice our absence for signing up for the CC version of PS. They will probably be sending us e-mail reminders. And if we still do not subscribe, Adobe may start getting the hint that maybe they should reconsider their decision.
I hope this happens. I'm on file with CS6. I've upgraded PS with every new release since whatever was out there in 2006. As others have discussed, PS is a central component in my workflow, especially actions and scripts. Not to mention the multi-layer PSD files that I revisit when I need to produce output at new size.
buggz2k wrote:
I've had it for while, since 6.
Unfortunately for me, my workflow is soo tied up in PS, plugins and scripts, sigh...
Yes. I have Photoshop CS5 set up perfectly with numerous custom actions. It took me a long time to learn PS and compile those actions. I am so used to PS and frankly I love it. Best software I have ever owned. Easily my favorite piece of software. But now that it will be ransomware.......I don't like the feeling. I don't see myself moving away from Photoshop. There is nothing out there that comes close to it. Plus I don't want to have to learn a new piece of software again. I am proficient at using Photoshop. It took me a long time to get that way. But this monthly rental situation goes against my economic world view. There is a clash of two worlds that don't fit together. One will win. One will lose. Time will tell which one.
